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[ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback insteadOutlining the Plot. : Conversation question • Page 2 • Writing Forum | WritersDigest.com

I think about the story and characters when I'm doing mundane chores like washing the dishes or weeding the garden, but my thoughts are on what's already happened, not what will happen.

For me, thinking on my story is sort of like that feeling you get when someone insults you, but you're so surprised by their nastiness that you can't come up with a good comeback until hours later when you're home and lying in bed stewing about the insult. When you're lying in your bed replaying the scene in your head, you think of all the ways you should have responded. That's what it's like for me when I'm thinking about my scenes and how my characters responded to their problems, or to each other. In the very first writing, my characters speak the first words that come to them, but when I have time to play it back in my head, the dialogue gets smarter, funnier, and just generally better. Definitely more meaningful and precise. Then when I sit down to write the next day, the first thing I do is go back over the last chapter written and make my characters speak the way they would, the way they should, rather than how I originally wrote them. (Because the first run through is my words, the second is theirs.) It only takes a few minutes to fix that stuff because by then it's pretty solid in my mind, and doing this bit of polishing puts me back into the story, and it also makes editing really easy once I'm finished with that final first draft. The result is that my "first" draft is pretty darn clean.

In high school, we were taught to outline. I hated it then and I still do. When I worked for a religious organization, we got one stab and answering a letter. You sat and typed the letter period. I guess that was extra good training for the way my mind works when I write. The characters just seem to talk to me and when they've written me into a situation I don't understand, I simply research the scenario. I have two novels which each have eight chapters and have come to a screeching halt, due to my lack of knowledge about what they are going to do. They will have to wait, until my family history novel is out querying. Then will come the wonderful experience of learning something new to work into the story. It sure is fascinating to write that way and I love it.

Long, long afterward in an oak I found the arrow still unbrokeAnd the song from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friendHenry Wadsworth Longfellow